There was no major shopping center in sight. Since leaving Front Royal, they’d passed only one weary, dilapidated strip mall with a Family Dollar as its anchor. Hope Valley truly appeared to be a self-contained little town that wasn’t merely an extension of some larger city’s urban sprawl.
“Serial killer in a small town, much?” he muttered, talking more to himself than to Wyatt, who was driving the sedan.
Dean had thought Wyatt would send him out with Mulrooney, but their team leader had insisted on driving out here to Nowhere, Virginia, with Dean this afternoon. As if he suspected, as did everyone else, that this case could be the key to bringing down the Reaper, whose crimes were the stuff nightmares and slasher movies were made of.
“So you still believe the unsub’s actually from this area?” Wyatt asked.
“Don’t you?”
The man pulled into a parking place in front of a small, single-story building marked SHERIFF’S OFFICE. “If our theories are correct, that Lisa Zimmerman was his first victim, and that her killing might have been personal, then yes, I think it’s likely.”
“The details fit. The physical description, identifying marks. We know the timing of her disappearance works, since Fletcher was able to determine within days when the murder occurred, given the lack of buds on the tree the vic was tied to.”
A ghost of a smile crossed Wyatt’s mouth. They’d all been impressed by that one. Lily might be a quiet office type without much field experience, but she had a brain like a steel trap. Because even though Lisa Zimmerman had disappeared in early March, a month before the “freebie” video had gone up, that hadn’t meant she’d died right away. But the bare, sullen trees hinted she’d met the cold, steely blade very close to that time.
“And,” Dean concluded, “the missing persons photo looks just like the woman on the tape.” To the untrained eye, it seemed irrefutable that Lisa Zimmerman had been their unidentified victim. Now they just had to get confirmation from someone who knew her.
Dean stared out the window, wondering how the locals would react. The idea that the Reaper lived here in their small-town heaven would probably send most of them running for their basements.
But it fit. If Lisa had, indeed, been the unsub’s first victim, it made complete sense that her killer was from here. And Dean wanted him. Badly.
The murder had been hard to watch, but it hadn’t gone on as long as the others. The young woman had been tied to a tree, naked, with her arms extended above her. While the killer had been free with his blade, Brandon had estimated that she’d died within twenty minutes of the first cut.
It had been brutal. But not quite as bad as some of the other victims, whose torture had lasted for hours. As Cole had said: There were different degrees of awful.
“You said you had the feeling the sheriff personally knew the missing woman?”
“Yeah.” Dean again looked around the town, all twelve inches of it. “I think so.”
Sheriff Rhodes, whose young, strong-yet-feminine voice had surprised him for a moment on the phone yesterday, hadn’t given him any details about her relationship with Lisa Zimmerman, but he’d lay odds she’d had one.
“Good thing we had Brandon capture some still frames,” Wyatt said. “I’d hate for anyone who knew Miss Zimmerman to have to actually watch that entire video.”
“It’s hard enough to see it happen to a stranger.”
“Fortunate that we didn’t have to get family members to ID any of the others. Or to make the pictures public in order to identify the victims,” Wyatt replied.
“No kidding. Tipping off those Satan’s Playground bastards would have been suicide for the entire case. The unsub would have taken a deep dive straight into cyber hell and might never be found again.”
They hadn’t needed personal identifications to determine who seven of the eight victims had been. There had been autopsy reports and police investigations to go on. Brandon had found the first; then they’d put names to six more. They had scoured reports and databases, matching unsolved murders to the videos. And in every other case, except the woman in the free preview, the victims’ bodies had already been found and ID’d.
“Let’s hope this sheriff is as cooperative as the other agencies have been,” he said. Each murder had been stymieing the local police, so, for a change, none of them had minded the FBI’s intrusion. The cases were growing cold, some stretching back more than a year. Plus, they were unlike anything the small-town authorities had ever seen.
If anybody had ever connected the killings, the FBI would likely have gotten involved long before now. But nobody had. The Reaper’s gimmick, auctioning off “means” but not victim, had helped him escape detection. There had been no common signature for anybody to stumble over. No similarity in the crimes, except that they were all unusually brutal. Or even in the victims, aside from the fact that they were all female and Caucasian. They ranged in age from seventeen to forty. Two were married, with kids, and three were young college students. A few had been sexually violated though not raped. Bodies had been dumped in wooded areas, a landfill, one in the bathroom of a rest stop. The crimes had been spread across four states, the only string tying them all together being a cyber one.
Chilling to think the cases might never have been connected at all had Brandon Cole not stumbled into Satan’s Playground.
“So, if the sheriff identifies Lisa Zimmerman as the Reaper’s first victim…?”
Wyatt cut the engine, and heat invaded the interior of the sedan so fast it might have been piped in. “Then you’ll be sticking around Hope Valley for a while.”
Exiting the car, Dean waited for a rusty Ford to wind its way down Main Street; then he crossed, Wyatt behind him. He entered the sheriff’s office, no being buzzed in, no metal detector, and glanced around. A trio of folding metal chairs stood in the empty waiting area.
“Notice something strange?” Wyatt asked, sounding bemused.
Dean nodded. Not only was there no security; there was nobody, period. The lobby was silent as a church during confession. And the glassed-in receptionist’s cubicle stood empty, the rolling chair pushed far away from the desk and turned, as if its occupant had hopped from it midslide.
“Afternoon siesta?” he mumbled.
As he began to wonder if they were going to have to go on a sheriff hunt, Dean suddenly heard raised voices coming from somewhere down a hallway marked, PRIVATE.
“God damn it, Stacey, if you can’t use your job, give it to someone who will!”
He and Wyatt exchanged a quick look. Both went on alert, as anyone would when it sounded as though a fellow law enforcement officer was being threatened.
“When did it become my job to get you out of your own messes? It’s not my responsibility to keep you from getting fired,” a woman snapped back, crisp and in control. Her voice sounded calm, betraying none of the throbbing anger of the male one that had preceded it. “You don’t want to lose your job? Then convince your boss you didn’t have anything to do with the cash shortage. Kiss his ass, whatever you have to do.”
Listening, Dean realized he knew the voice of the woman. That confidence had impressed him yesterday on the phone, especially since the strong, authoritative tone did not entirely disguise a slightly husky, sexy quality. Sheriff Rhodes, he had already decided, was one cool customer. Which was probably a good thing, if this morning’s argument was anything to go by. She apparently faced some crazy demands in her job.